Friends for traveling together
.jpg?w=728)
By Kim Ji-myung
“To know the true character of a person, you need to do three things together with him ― drink wine, take a public bath and play golf.” Koreans often apply this simple rule when a daughter brings a guy home and tells her parents that she wants to marry him.
Well, this three-test process may reveal the true face of a person. When you get drunk, when you are naked and when you are under the stress of playing golf with a would-be father-in-law, you might find it very difficult to showcase a nice personality that is not truly your own.
I would add one more process for finding a hidden side of a person – traveling together. A comfortable travel-partner is not easy to find.
As a Korean, I belong to a much-travelled group. During my stay in Germany for many years, my family toured around a lot on weekends and during vacations.
My interest in “popular” history, such as how to best interpret and write about history for the general public, made my trips all the more interesting and rewarding.
The best trip I remember was to have a friend, long-time resident in Paris, organize the two-week tour for us, rent a pension house in Provence, book a rent car and plan our daily schedule in-detail, to explore every corner of southern France. The wife of the house bought fresh baguettes for us. We ate apricots that we picked from a tree in the garden.
My friend drove the car and explained every line of each menu at restaurants we stopped at so that we could choose our favorites. Thanks to his kind explanations, I learned why the color of the salt farm in Camarague is violet-pink, and how important the taste of salt is in French cooking, for example. But it was a quite exceptional dream-come-true sort of a trip, which cannot be easily repeated.
Now living in Seoul, I take group tours to European cities mostly, once-a-year on average. I usually invite another Korean couple to join us, because a man and wife usually find too many issues to disagree on if they alone are travelling together. You might agree that it’s better to have someone else to turn your attention to.
Except for a few cases, I insist on going with a European travel agency. Why don’t I take group tours offered by Korean travel agencies?
There are a few reasons, which I think the Korean travel industry ought to pay attention to. First, on those group tours, your hotels are usually very nice but placed in a remote suburb, where you see nothing after dinner. People say it is because of the low prices ― due to overly tough competition among agencies.
But an important truth is that, the good old hotels in the Lake District of the U.K., for example, are already booked year-round by local travel agencies with good reputations and strong traditions. Korean travel agencies find it almost impossible to wedge into these long-term contracts even if they wanted to.
Second, if you are a guest on a group tour of a Korean agency, you can hardly pretend to be an elegant traveler enjoying a decent trip. Most of the time, you are forced to haul your own luggage, rush to the next site on the schedule, and quickly eat what is offered at a restaurant which you did not chose. Of course, the level of service matches the price you paid.
But there are lessons to learn from the seasoned European agencies. They offer diverse levels of services to choose from, according to your taste and depth of purse, on top of the basic conveniences of a group tour. For example, you may bring more than one suitcase with you if you only pay an extra $1 per day. All your luggage will be taken care of by hotel staff even though you are in a group.
And it is a common rule that guests move one seat forward (or backward) on the bus everyday so that the best seats are not monopolized by a few aggressive occupiers.
My favorite agency offers a celebration dinner and some table-d’hote dinners included in the cost, but also have optional dinner and entertainment programs.
Well, of course, you need to speak some English to enjoy a tour run by a European agency. But this “Art of Touring in Style” might shed a light on the deficiencies of local and out-bound products of the Korean agencies.
Some very rich Koreans surprise me by being so stingy when they choose a tour product ― and then, they complain about the quality of service. Not many listen to the professional interpretation at heritage sites. Buying brand-name handbags is often the main purpose of the tour for some young ladies.
Maybe Korea needs to wait to see the emergence of a new generation of reasonable and sophisticated tourists.
Now, going back to the issue of your travel partners...Who are the best companions for a trip?
Travelling involves seeing, eating and buying. Travel partners will disagree if they don’t share similar interests, policies on spending money, tastes and values.
What if your partners do not meet your expectations? Just mingle with other members of the group, other than your Korean partners, even though you might feel most comfortable talking in your mother-tongue with your friends.
The writer is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage). Her email address is Heritagekorea21@gmail.com.